Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Blacula (1972)

Title: Blacula (1972)

Director: William
Crain

Cast: William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Thalmus Rasulala

Blaxploitation films started as a genre with one of two
films, depending on whom you ask, the first blaxploitation film was either Melvin
Van Peeble’s Sweet Sweetback’s Bad Ass Song (1971) or Gordon Park’s Shaft (1971).
Some don’t consider Sweet Sweetback’s Bad Ass Song an exploitation film, so
they give the title of first blaxploitation film to Shaft. Point is that after the
release of these two films many more blaxploitation films followed, most of
them focused on drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes or tough cops, but not one of
them was a horror film; until Blacula (1972) came along that is! After the
success of Blacula, more blaxploitation horror films followed. For example we
got Abby (1974), Ganja and Hess (1973), Blackenstein (1973) and Dr. Black and
Mr. White (1976). So Blacula is an extremely important film in the sense that
it’s the first African American Blaxploitation horror film; and the first time
we ever saw an African American vampire!

In Blacula we meet Mamuwalde, an African prince who has come
all the way from Africa to visit Count Dracula in his castle; apparently
Mamuwalde doesn’t know that Dracula is the king of all bloodsucking vampires!
But anyways, Mamuwalde being an African prince has a political agenda in mind.
He’s come to get Dracula to sign a treaty that would end slavery, an
arrangement that does not sit well with Dracula at all! Instead Dracula decides
to curse Mamuwalde by turning him into a vampire and christening him ‘Blacula’!
Then Dracula has Mamuwalde locked up up in a coffin, leaving him there
indeterminately. Mamuwalde becomes a tortured soul for many years because he
has not only become a vampire, but since he is locked inside of a coffin, he
can’t satiate his vampire blood lust! He can’t feed! So anyway, fast forward
200 years and an unsuspecting gay couple opens Mamuwalde’s coffin out of
curiosity and out comes Blacula into the
modern world! With a hunger he hasn’t been able to satiate in 200 years! So of
course, he first feeds on the two gay dudes! After that, Blacula decides to walk
the streets of the modern world and it is during this walk that he stumbles
upon a woman who resembles his late wife, so then it becomes his mission in
life to make this woman fall in love with him. Will Mamuwalde ever find love
again?

"You shall be known as Blacula!"

In many ways, Blacula plays out like your basic Dracula
adaptation, going step by step through the same basic structure of a Dracula
film, only difference is that Blacula is set in modern times and Dracula is
black this time around. On Blacula, Mamuwalde finds the re-incarnation of his
long lost love, which comes in the form of a young woman named Tina, a young
lady that Blacula begins to court; so like many vampire films, Blacula is
essentially a love story about a vampire looking for someone to accompany him
through eternity. But where Blacula takes a left turn is when they set him in
the modern world, which means placing Blacula in Los Angeles, circa the early 1970’s,
which is really the funniest aspect of the film for me. Actually, when we
really get down to it, this film plays out a bit like Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows
(2010), because it is the same basic idea of having a vampire locked up inside
a coffin many years and then releasing him into the modern world. But in my
opinion, Blacula didn’t really exploit this whole idea of thrusting a character
from ancient times into modern times; it really didn’t play with that ‘fish out
of water’ angle that Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows played with so well. On this
one, Blacula stumbles upon the modern world and fits right in; he doesn’t
seemed amazed at all by the ‘modern world’ of the 70’s. I mean, to him cars
should be magic! But no, on this film Blacula walks into a nightclub and asks
for a ‘Bloody Mary’ as if he’d done it ten thousand times before.

In that sense, the film has a couple of plot holes in it.
Not to mention that Blacula walks around the city streets wearing a freaking
cape! What I thought was hilarious about this movie was how so much of it
revolves around Blacula visiting this nightclub to meet up with Tina and have a
couple of drinks. That’s right my friends, on this film you’ll see Mamuwalde visiting
a nightclub, talking to babes, having a couple of drinks, socializing and
listening to soul bands playing funky music all night long. This is something that
happens a lot in blaxploitation films, I remember a similar scene in Super Fly
(1972), where a funky band plays in the background and takes a few minutes of
screen time to show what they are made of. This is all cool in my book if you
ask me, very funky, very 70’s, very black and it’s what blaxploitation cinema
is all about. I don’t know if they realized they were making a funny movie or
not, I think Blacula is unintentionally funny and simply a product of crazy ass
70’s blaxploitation scene, but I gotta tell ya, I love it just like it is.
There’s something really funny about Dracula being in a nightclub listening to
a funky soul band, which by the way was a real life soul band known as ‘The
Hues Corporation’. Some might find that it takes away from the horror element
of the film, but I say it’s what makes Blacula unique amongst other Dracula
films.

There’s an underlying social message within the film because
Mamuwalde is turned into a vampire by a racist, cold blooded, unforgiving
Dracula, a white man who wants to hear nothing about abolishing slavery. On
this film Mamuwalde is cursed by the white man! Anyone, be they black or white can
enjoy these films, but they were primarily made with black audiences in mind.
American International Pictures promoted it by pushing the slavery angle, so
this is probably the reason why in some scenes white characters are portrayed
as dumb and incompetent, or play second banana to the black characters. In
fact, one of the main characters is a black doctor called Gordon Smith who is
in charge of the investigation; he is portrayed as smarter than any cop in the
film, with the white cop always two steps behind. So what we have with Blacula
is a film that has strong black leads, which was something rarely seen in those
days in cinema, with the exception of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead
(1968), strong black leads where unheard of. The interesting thing is that sometimes
Blacula doesnt feel like a blaxsploitation film at all. For example, director
William Crane didn’t use an all black cast, his cast was actually multiracial,
and had the black man working alongside the white man in unison, which I think
is a very positive thing about the film, it doesn’t do the stereotypical thing
of always portraying the white man as “evil”.

Blacula stands as a bonafide cult classic, mainly because it
was the first film in which we see a black vampire and because it was the first
blaxploitation horror film ; something that up to that point hadn’t been done
before. Eddie Murphy attempted a similar thing when he played ‘Maximillian’ in
Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), an underrated vampire flick if you ask
me and a film that holds many similarities with Blacula. I’m sure that Eddie
Murphy and Wes Craven had Blacula in mind when they made their film, they
probably wanted to ‘up the ante’ with their film. Blacula does suffer a little bit from a
low budget aesthetic, I mean, the sound is terrible in certain moments and so
is the lighting, but I still found myself enjoying the film. I felt a certain
type of empathy for Mamuwalde. True Mamuwalde is a vampire, a killer, but same
as many vampire films, you feel a certain kind of empathy for the character. He
seems to be truly in love with Tina, and Tina with him, yet there’s always that
conflict of “but he is a cold blooded killer!” You’ll find yourself rooting for
Blacula anyways which is something kind of interesting about the film. So my
friends, Blacula is a blaxploitation classic, it got the ball rolling in terms
of horror blaxploitation films and has an important African American director
behind it in William Crain, one of the first black directors who worked on television,
and the guy who made the first blaxploitation horror film with Blacula, which
by the way made a lot of cash for American International Pictures. In fact,
Blacula was so successful that it spawned a sequel entitled Scream Blacula
Scream (1973), a film I will be reviewing soon. Make it a point to check out
this excellent, historically important slice of 70’s horror blaxploitation, you’re
sure to have some fun with it.

4 comments:

Funny thing for a guy who appeared on a film called Boss Nigger (1974) with the tag line "White Mans Town...Black Man's Law!"

It's just a term, I don't think it's offensive. It simply explains what these films did...exploit something, in this case, they exploited the market for black audiences. It gave black audiences and anyone else who ventured to see them a lot of "blackness"...with a low budget, sometimes even low moral and a b-movie sensibility, to mention just some of the many things that characterize an exploitation film. Blaxploitation films exploited the black culture, just like sexploitation films exploit sex.

Great review, Fran. BLACULA is a favorite of mine. The soundtrack is excellent, too. There are so many good things in this movie, although it's a product of its time.

Regarding Blacula going to the club, I think he was just going there to see the lady who looked like his dead wife Luva; and of course to find a victim or two. William Marshall was amazing here and in the sequel. A shame they didn't do a third film.